On this day in 1971, Simone Langenhoff, aged 6, was killed while cycling to school; hit by a speeding driver.

Her death and the movement started by her father, Vic Langenhoff, a newspaper journalist, changed an entire country and saved thousands of Dutch lives. Here's how 🧵 He joined other grieving parents to campaign for change. Vic Langenhoff wrote this in his newspaper in September 1972: “A few people have stood up who want to break through the apathy with which Dutch people accept the daily slaughter of children in traffic.”

When we build bigger roads, we get more traffic. Congestion briefly gets better, then the same, then worse. £Billions is spent in the process.

Instead of dualling roads, what if we used the space for active travel instead? Here’s a thread on why it should happen.🧵

These pictures, taken by @carltonreid, show the A27 rural active travel path, adjacent to the main road. Rather than build a bigger carriageway, National Highways instead built one of the best rural active travel paths in the country, as featured in @laura_laker’s book.

This Platinum Jubilee weekend, 1000s of residential roads will be closed. Kids will play out safely. People will get to know their neighbours.

Then come Monday, those streets will revert to carrying overspill traffic from the main road network. But what if we changed that? 1/n It’s very usual for people living in quiet Dutch streets, filtered from motor traffic, to set up a table outside the front and have dinner with neighbours.

In the space once taken up by cars, they’ll now find playgrounds and public squares.

Some new ideas aren’t actually very new at all.

Here’s US Postmen, British suffragette Lady Florence Norman and a US couple using foldable Autopeds in the 1910s.

They were very popular for a while until street speeds became too hostile for their use, and motor cars took over. Some things never change, huh? There was outrage in newspapers. “Solo devil wagon taken up in a serious way might add new terrors to city life,” read one subheading.

The vehicles also became a symbol of women’s empowerment.

THREAD: Ealing council has released the results of its consultation, a sort of hyper-local referendum, on Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

Whether you support them or not, I think we can all agree this process is the blueprint for how NOT to make decisions on transport policy. Firstly, here are the results. 22,000 people responded out of a population of 340,000 Borough population - this self-selecting sample is just 6.47% and is the most vocal and engaged.

The climate emergency, road danger, long-term air pollution, of course, affect everybody.

THREAD (1/10) The Telegraph report that London Ambulance staff logged 159 occasions in 8 months where LTNs delayed them. This isn’t ideal but let’s put it in the context of other 999 delays.

Widely normalised traffic congestion held up London Fire Brigade *8,841* times in 2017. It was lower in 2020 because of the pandemic but still 5,542 instances because of traffic or roadworks. Plus, over 2,000 each year because they had the wrong address.

When was the last time you saw a headline on “Increased Car Usage and Associated Congestion Cause 999 Delays”?

THREAD: Today, between 1200-2500 people marched against #LTNs in Ealing. In doing so, they inadvertently demonstrated why they are essential.

In London, 36% of car journeys could be walked in under 25 mins. Human-powered transport is very space-efficient.
If the same amount of people had used cars at the London average occupancy rate (1.3), it would have looked something like this (pics represent approx. 923 or 1,923 cars). With 1m in between each car, this number would stretch nearly 7km or 14km of road - some traffic jam!

This is the BBC's Environment Correspondent describing a video, widely shared by troll accounts, of a man shouting and swearing near families in a residential street as "brilliant".

This led to a one-sided piece on LTNs which was devoid of any fact-checking.

THREAD (1/18) 👇 I won't share the BBC video. I don't want to give it any more oxygen and reward the clickbait nature. If you really want to see it, you'll find it.

If you must watch the shouting man video, to see why this is inappropriate to be describing as "brilliant", it's here.

(2/18)

I am an optimist. I have to be. And I so desperately want to be wrong but it is very clear to me that tomorrow’s @RBKC meeting tomorrow to decide on reinstating the Ken High St cycle lane is just public theatre on an already decided outcome. Short THREAD 👇 Like @betterstreetskc eloquently state, the report prepared for Councillors is riddled with errors, has important omissions and is framed through a lens of “man in the street” punditry, not hard available data, expert assessment or good policy.

THREAD: The need to enable active travel is not going away. It will only become more urgent as we fail to meet climate + pollution targets.

Every major political party’s manifesto wanted more cycling infrastructure; now is the time to stop using it for hyperlocal point scoring. What’s more, the majority of people support it. Polls show 77% think more cycling would decrease congestion. Two thirds support road space reallocation for active travel.

Regardless of politic persuasion, people are more and more concerned about the environment.

THREAD: A thread on research and sampling, and how the media use data and polling.

I can safely say from a decade of working with media, it is *highly* unusual for a newspaper to so heavily reference a self-selecting and homemade survey and present it as the views of all people. Surveys with self-selecting samples, in this case, both from FairFuelUK + cycling advocates, should not be represented as the views of all of those groups; same goes for claiming data represents "Tory voters".

And that's without even mentioning the survey's leading questions.

Today you might read that cycle lanes will have an impact on ambulance response times, which naturally sounds concerning. But the more you look into it, the more baseless it becomes; quotes from just one individual used by media with an agenda. (Thread)

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8… A new phenomenon caused by hastily rushed through COVID measures, another thing to be concerned about in 2020?

Well, no, the same spokesperson @Richardwebber99 said the same thing in 2017, also to the Mail, about separated cycle lanes then. Concerns that never materialised.

A thread on Play Streets - how society demonised children, briefly gave them places to play before shunning them for cars. And what might be next?

1835: Highway Act bans street games on Highway.

1860: 12-year-old George Dunn sent to prison for 5 days for playing in the street. 1912: Lord Lamington tells the Lords “Children have not many recreation grounds in London. It is only natural they play in the street.”

Between 1922-1933, over TWELVE THOUSAND children are killed by motor vehicles.

1935: By now, 2,000 children prosecuted for playing in streets